Off the Menu Read online

  “It was great, as usual, Margot Channing. I think it will be your best season ever.” Patrick hates it when I use old movie references, as he is allergic to black-and-white. But watching him take his makeup off is so very All About Eve, I just can’t help it.

  “And I’m not going bobblehead yet, right?” Patrick is very aware of what we call the bobblehead phenomenon when it comes to food television. The networks hire people with real, genuine personalities, endearing quirks, and charming ways about them to host shows. And somehow, the more time they spend doing their various projects, the more overexposured they become, and the more they are turned into weird and annoying caricatures of themselves. Initially cute phrases become overused tag lines. The anecdotes get more far-fetched. The special episodes become more heavily costumed and thematically insane. The joy and passion for cooking become forced, the smiles wider, the eyes more dead. Odd guest stars are trotted out. Veneers and hair extensions and plastic surgery rear their heads, making everyone look like the Madame Tussauds wax version of who they used to be. There are more and more competition shows devoted to finding new hosts, the casts of which mostly range from mildly annoying to Machiavellian. The solution seems to be to just keep adding shows, perhaps in an attempt to keep the hosts themselves interested, but really just further diluting their appeal.

  People who were easy and entertaining their first couple of seasons, now a decade or more in, are painfully unwatchable. Very few have escaped becoming bobbleheads. Nigella Lawson is one, and she is one of the few I still TiVo. Especially since she did an event with Patrick, and I got to spend half a day with her. She is luminously beautiful, and just as smart and funny and humble as she appears to be on television. Plus, all her recipes actually work, which is rarer than you might think for people who make a living cooking on TV. Jamie Oliver is another, although he walks a fine line sometimes and I don’t hold great hope for him in the long run. Some of the new faces on the Cooking Channel are hanging in there, although some of them started full-on bobble and aren’t getting better. And as far as I’m concerned Tom Colicchio can do no wrong, and I wish someone would give him a cooking show—I can’t imagine him going bobblehead. But the Food Network as a whole has pretty much completely jumped the shark, and at least 30 percent of Patrick’s colleagues on Food TV are bobbling, and the network is only five years old. Which is really troubling, since they are looking into launching a sister network themselves, because what America really needs is four channels devoted to twenty-four-hours-a-day food television.

  Patrick is very easy on camera, and has so far been able to just stay himself, at least the fun, happy, nice, competent television version of himself, which makes his shows still relevant and is why all the talk shows love him. The daytimes love his ability to banter and do a cooking demo simultaneously, and the nighttimes love his quick wit, willingness to laugh at himself, and the fact that he is up for anything. Letterman especially loves to have him on, even occasionally having him do a “man on the street” segment. I’ve always been enormously grateful to a certain Italian mama’s-boy chef whose on-camera cringe-worthy devolution and subsequent need to completely resurrect his career and re-form his face have meant that Patrick has both turned down all offers of reality shows and stayed far away from the Botox.

  “Thanks, Alana-banana. I felt good about it, especially that last episode. And I love what you did with the French toast, the brûlée-ing idea was a genius move.”

  We wanted to do French toast for the brunch, but acknowledged that it is a dangerous item for a special event where people might be dressed up. Patrick had an awesome recipe for the toast itself, using day-old Challah, melted vanilla ice cream as a main ingredient in the soaking liquid, and just a hint of sea salt. I had come up with an alternative to the sticky drippy-down-your-front maple syrup problem by mixing equal parts maple sugar and demerara sugar, and having him sprinkle this on top of the already-cooked French toast and doing a quick brûlée under the broiler, giving the toast a thin crackly maple sugar shell. All the sweet and smoky taste, nothing ruining your mother-in-law’s favorite silk blouse.

  “Glad you approved. But even gladder that you finally managed to do it without setting it on fire.” Three takes of smoking, blackened bread, because Patrick was waxing poetic about his ex–mother-in-law and forgot to get the pan out of the oven.

  “What can I say; Dora means the world to me.” It’s true. Patrick’s ex-wife, Sharlene, would not piss on him if he were on fire. But her mom secretly stays in touch, and Patrick takes her to a special lunch once a year, and still sends her Mother’s Day cards, and fairly lavish birthday gifts, which I agonize over choosing for him. I think this has less to do with genuine affection for Dora and more with it being a wonderful way to send a big fat middle finger to his ex.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Change of plans for the weekend. I’m going to head to New York to check in on the new place, and have some meetings.”

  Crap. I was so hoping to have a life this weekend, maybe brunch with the girls, some doggie-park time with Dumpling. My disappointment must show on my face.

  “No worries, pumpkin, going solo. You are off the hook for the next three days.”

  I can feel my entire spine relax. “Sure you don’t need me?” Please don’t need me please don’t need me …

  “I always need you, you are my right arm and my left lung and my middle testicle, but I’ll be okay for one little weekend in New York.” The little smirk playing around the corner of his mouth tells me all I need to know. In New York will be a new set of Legs, making my presence both unnecessary and unwelcome. Which is fine by me.

  “Well, you and your testicles behave yourself and leave the city standing. Stealth me if you need anything.” Patrick and I have a private instant-messaging system on both of our iPhones, which he calls “stealthing.” The messages don’t get stored on any system and cannot be hacked. It is almost CIA-presidential. But when you are a celeb and Us Weekly pays a bundle for text messages and e-mails of a private nature, you get a little paranoid.

  Patrick wipes the last of the cream off his face, and stands up, with his traditional kissing of the top of my head. I know he thinks it is a big-brotherly type of affectionate display, but frankly it always feels a little condescending. And reminds me that I am only five three. It doesn’t bother me enough to ask him to stop, since I’ve experienced the alternative, which is his signature kiss on the inside of the wrist. He takes your hand and then turns it over, kissing you right where your hand meets your arm. It makes you all tingly in your girl parts, completely beyond your conscious control, which utterly wigs me out. It’s like having a random sex dream about Dick Cheney. You know consciously that it doesn’t mean you actually find him attractive in any way, but you still feel like you want to take a Silkwood shower when you wake up.

  “You put some weekend in your weekend, kitten. We have a big week next week.”

  “We always have a big week. Do you need me to make any arrangements?” Patrick’s executive assistant, Andrea, usually does travel booking, but she has been out all week with a horrible flu. The one unbreakable rule on Team Patrick is that the moment you feel like your health is going round the bend, you call in and stay away. We work too closely together, for too many hours, with too little ventilation to let anyone sick, even with just the sniffles, come in to work. If you are able to be available on computer and phone, great, but keep your in-person germs to yourself. There is an industrial-size pump jar of Purell around every corner, Airborne and Vitamin C lozenges and zinc tablets on the craft service table, and our crew washes hands like the set is an operating theater. But with this kind of diligence, we have not had the kind of crud that so often sweeps through a whole team. And because Patrick insists on contracts being very generous about paid sick days, including days to take care of spouses or children who are sick, no one takes advantage.

  “I was a big boy and made my own arrangements, thank you very much.”

&nb
sp; Which means that he is staying with whomever she is, and doesn’t need a hotel room.

  “Great. Well then, have an amazing trip, eat something delicious for me, and we’ll hit this again on Monday.”

  I scamper across the hall to my little office, wall-to-wall cookbooks, and piles of recipes in progress. It should take me less than twenty minutes to finish up some e-mails, and approve the shooting schedule for next week, and then I can head out. Barry is freshly back from his star turn in Philly, with a pile of excellent reviews and a Barrymore nomination, and he and Dumpling are celebrating at an after-school program for autistic kids and their nonspectrum siblings. If I hurry, I’ll have plenty of time to stop and see my folks for a real decent visit before heading home. I flip open my laptop.

  RJ from Chicago has answered your questions at EDestiny! Special free weekend starts today, log in and see what he has to say. Your destiny could be right here!

  Oh. My. I had forgotten about that. It’s been nearly a month since I hit that button, and we’ve been so busy it didn’t occur to me to remember that I had reached out, or to be annoyed that he didn’t reach back. But apparently, here he is. And the fact that it is another freebie event is not lost on me—he grudgingly gets extra points for probably not wanting to pay them anything either.

  I click the link, and log in to my account. I can’t help but notice that the first thing on my profile is a notification that I have a new match. Jerry is sixty, five four, with an obvious Grecian Formula dye job, including his neatly trimmed beard, and apparently makes his living as a magician. I always wanted to date a man in a cape.

  RJ has not added anything to his profile, including a picture. Likelihood of him being Trolltacular increases exponentially. Ditto married. I open his response.

  1. If you could have a dinner party with any three people, living or dead, who would you invite and what would you serve?

  Hmm. Very good question. As an aside, having taken some time with your profile, you are a very good writer! So, that puts me in the mind of writers for this little dinner party …. Oscar Wilde for certain, no lulls in conversation and he’s British, so anything I serve would be an upgrade to his diet. George Sand, since that gives lots of flexibility in boy/girl seating arrangements. And you, naturally. For me, this kind of meal starts with wine, and wine means Burgundy. So, besides laughter and entendre, expect some combination of gougères, quenelles, mushrooms and birds with lots of really good Burgundy from the cellar.

  2. Looking back on your life, of what are you most proud?

  That I’m a go-to person for my family and my good friends. My parents and sister are accomplished people who have touched a lot of people’s lives, but they still depend on me for thoughtful advice. I’m very proud of that. Same for my closest friends, who tend to be very successful in a variety of fields, although when I think of it, with my pals it is often mostly about food and wine.

  3. What is the one dream for your life you most look forward to having come true?

  Accepting that my life is really good and that my dreams aren’t all just over the horizon. That being said, one dream is to be able to answer these questions and not have it be all about just me.

  Oh. My.

  Oscar Wilde, my favorite non-food writer, whose famous quote “I can resist everything except temptation” is my slowly scrawling screen saver. And gougères. Wonderful gougères. The first thing I taught myself how to make in my tiny apartment in Paris during my semester abroad, which was the impetus for my returning home, dropping out, and going to culinary school. My first duty during my stage at an auberge outside of Lyon, filling endless baskets with the hot, crispy cheesy puffs for the better part of my first week. Gougères are my own personal soul food. He likes his family, so I assume he will understand and respect my connection to my own crazy brood. And he dreams of a life that isn’t about him, rare for someone his age who is single; most of them are all about themselves. Now I am totally sure he is either deeply unattractive or married, or even both.

  I pick up the phone and call Bennie, and read her his responses.

  “Oh, HONEY! He sounds dreamy. What did you send back?”

  “Nothing yet. I mean, do I even want to? Hitting the button the first time was just some strange impulsive move. But this seems, I don’t know, real. What if he’s actually great? Do I have time to meet someone great? Look at my schedule! Look at my life, what there is of it. Is it even fair to him to respond?” I can hear Bennie’s deep, warm laugh.

  “Do you hear yourself? You’re already worried about disappointing your boyfriend. How about you just reply like a good girl and see what happens before you imagine yourself ruining your relationship.”

  I can see her point. “Fine. I’ll respond. But it will all end in tears.” We both laugh.

  “Send me a copy of what you send him,” she demands.

  “Will do. Talk to you later.”

  I stare at the blank EDestiny e-mail screen. I take a deep breath. It has been so long since I bothered to do this that I feel almost like I don’t know how.

  It’s like bread baking. Get into the habit and you can do it by feel and sight and smell; no recipe needed. You know by the amount and quality of bubbles if the yeast has proofed enough. The dough will tell your hands when it has had all the flour it needs. You can smell the moment it is perfectly cooked, crust firm and crisp, insides pillowy and cooked through but still elastic. Get out of the habit and your dough doesn’t rise, your crumb is too dense, the middle is gummy and raw-tasting, your crust pallid and the taste insipid. Flirting, communicating, reacting, and generating reactions are all muscles long atrophied in me. My “on the DL” thing with Bruce keeps me perky enough, no pressure, no strings, no complications, no expectations.

  Thing is, deep down, maybe a complication or expectation or two wouldn’t be so bad.

  Dear RJ—

  Thank you for your response to my questions, and the compliment on my writing. I don’t know that I have shown any particular skill thus far, but I’m most appreciative of the kind thought. I am, however, far more appreciative of your own talents in expressing yourself, the fact that you use complete and grammatical sentences, do not use text-message abbreviations, and seem to actually have things in common with me. These attributes make you exceedingly rare on this site, at least in my experience, and for that I am profoundly grateful.

  The fact that you would invite Oscar Wilde (one of my favorite writers) to dinner is a definite bonus. That you even know what a gougère is, let alone possess the ability to successfully produce them, seems an embarrassment of riches. And as I am a devout fan of Burgundies both red and white, we are off to a lovely start.

  So, what can I tell you? I’m a first-generation Chicagoan. Mom and Dad married in a little town outside of Moscow and emigrated instead of a honeymoon. I have two older brothers and a younger sister. My brothers each have three boys, and my sister has two little girls, so family events have eight kids under the age of nine, which may be a big part of why I have chosen to remain childless. Also? Children are sticky. So I’m both utterly devoted to my nieces and nephews, and always very grateful to hand them back to my siblings when I am done spoiling them. I am embarrassingly passionate about the Bears (despite current performance level), and the quest for the perfect roasted chicken.

  I think most flavored waters taste like furniture polish, and yet cannot stop drinking Pamplemousse LaCroix, and go through a case every other day or so. I do not really know if this is because I genuinely love the light grapefruit flavor that much or if it is because pamplemousse is my favorite word in French.

  I like college basketball better than pro, lard over butter or shortening for piecrusts, and I choose to believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

  I don’t think there is ever a wrong time to drink champagne, unless it is plonk. I don’t believe there is ever a right time to watch Jerry Springer.

  I’m never sure what is relevant information in these situations, so if the
re is anything I haven’t covered already, feel free to ask.

  Tag, you’re it.

  Alana

  I copy and paste a version to send to Bennie, and then, before I lose my nerve, send it out into the ether in the direction of RJ. And grab my bag and head out before someone hands me something that needs attending.

  4

  I jump into the Honda Accord Hybrid that Maria gave me as a parting bonus gift when I left her employ, and head over to Gene’s Sausage Shop in Lincoln Square. My mom has wanted to make pelmeni with me for a while, so I figured with my little gift of time this afternoon we can knock out a big batch while catching up. I have Gene’s coarse grind beef shoulder and pork butt in equal parts, throwing a couple of onions and a few garlic cloves into the grind for me to save us chopping. My mother has not removed the Cuisinart food processor I bought her for Mother’s Day seven years ago from its box, preferring to use her double-bladed chopper and a battered wooden bowl that were part of the dowry she schlepped here from Russia fifty years ago. But while I have time for pelmeni, I don’t have patience for doing everything by hand, and this will save us a world of mutual annoyance.

  I park in front of my parents’ small bungalow on Karlov just off Milwaukee Avenue. Every time I come here I am astonished that the six of us managed to live here together; it seems impossibly tiny. And yet, here we were, Mama and Papa; my brothers, Sasha and Alexei; me; and my little sister, Natalia. Three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, fifteen hundred square feet. About half the size of my current condo. My Realtor thought I was a little insane when I bought my place on Francisco, the first floor of what was originally a Victorian mansion on a double lot, complete with the original built-in hutch in the large dining room and a butler’s pantry. All for a single woman who has no intention of starting a family. But after spending most of my life elbow to elbow with not only my immediate family, but also my aunt and uncle and five cousins who lived two doors down and were in and out of our house like it was just the south wing of their own, I have always craved expansive space and deep, glorious quiet. My place is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom sanctuary, and someday I plan to finish out the portion of the basement that is part of my unit to create a master bedroom suite of ridiculous proportions.